Exodus clouds the future in South America

Best, brightest flee continent in crisis

June 22, 2001|By Patrice M. Jones, Tribune foreign correspondent.

LIMA, Peru — As the sun crests above the dusty hillsides in Peru's capital, hordes of the nation's economic refugees line up outside the U.S. Embassy. A record number of visa applications has overwhelmed embassy officials.

The story is not much different in Argentina. South America's richest nation is straining under one of its worst economic recessions, and its educated young adults are leaving in droves.

In Colombia and Venezuela, demand for visas is so strong that it has spawned a bustling cottage industry of immigration attorneys and brokers who find comfortable refuge for middle- and upper-class South Americans fleeing guerrilla violence and political strife.

The wave of South Americans leaving for distant nations has become one of the largest exoduses in at least a decade.

With economic and political crises rattling the continent, hundreds of thousands of people are leaving families and businesses behind, sparking concerns about the loss of the region's brightest workers and raising questions about the nations' social and economic future.

Struggling with `brain drain'

"It is posing a brain drain," said Graciela Romer, a sociologist and political consultant, referring to the lines of young people who camp overnight at foreign consulates in Buenos Aires to be among the first in line when the offices open. The Italian Consulate is so swamped with second- and third-generation descendants of Italians applying for citizenship that the earliest available appointments for interviews are in October 2002.

"Young people today see that many, many people have highest level of education and still they are unemployed," Romer said. "So like their grandparents who came here from Europe decades ago, they are leaving for a better life."

The number of South Americans fueling the exodus is difficult to quantify because of illegal immigration, but analysts estimate conservatively that more than 150,000 may be putting down roots each year in the United States alone. That number is about half those entering the U.S. legally and otherwise from Mexico, estimated at about 300,000.

But while the United States has a long history of immigration from Mexico, the South American trend has been gaining steam recently, spurred mainly by political strife and economic crisis.

Similar strife prompted South Americans to flee the dual plague of hyperinflation and guerrilla violence during the 1980s, but many nations rebounded economically in the '90s.

Now the region is struggling again to gain economic and political footing. Free-market reforms have resulted in job cuts, government cutbacks and company closures in many countries.

While a 15 percent unemployment rate has prompted Argentines to flee, many Colombians are political refugees desperate to escape a bloody guerrilla war.

And wealthy Venezuelans, angered by fiery populist President Hugo Chavez--who calls the nation's elite oligarchs--have left empty homes scattered across upscale neighborhoods in the capital, Caracas.

The Colombian American Service Association, a Miami-based immigration aid group, estimates that 130,000 Colombians have left the country on six-month tourist visas during the past two years and have not returned. At least as many Venezuelans have left since Chavez took office in 1999, according to published reports.

But while South America may suffer a loss of its best and brightest, the impact on the United States from the flow of recent arrivals is not expected to cause an undue strain, according to analysts.

Boon to the United States

Some argue that the U.S. economy will benefit from the low-skilled labor some immigrants provide, as well as the top-notch skills of educated South Americans.

"In terms of the overall economy, it is clear that immigration is a major positive for the United States," said James Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "People who come both at the lower end of and upper end of the economic spectrum contribute to U.S. economic growth."

And while a few countries, such as Chile, have avoided outward migration, many nations, including Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador and Brazil, have been powerless to prevent the flight of rich and poor.

Migration took off in Ecuador in 1997 as the economy started its downward spiral. Companies folded, jobs disappeared and currency depreciation cut into purchasing power.

A startling 2.5 percent of the Ecuadorean population--300,000 people--have abandoned the nation in the past three years, according to government estimates.

Many have headed to places like the agricultural region in southern Spain but also to the U.S. About $10,000 is the average price to get to the U.S. illegally.

Such flight is leaving many small towns desolate, but remittances from Ecuadoreans living abroad reached $1.3 billion last year, up 23 percent from 1999 and second only to oil export revenue.

In Peru, where more than half of the population lives in poverty, the U.S. Embassy has been inundated with visa requests. Many Peruvians tell officials they have saved and saved for vacations to Disney World, but they end up in Miami, New York or Chicago with no plans to return home.

Those hopefuls seem unmoved by the recent election victory of Peru's first Andean-Indian president-elect, Alejandro Toledo, who has promised to create a million new jobs.